Issue 2: Peter Larkin

Stone Forest 5

Not a forest of volume stone but a fidelity concurrence abiding the spire of empty socket.  Tie is simply an overbalanced tree, the bulb picket where you hear a steady stone in lithified current to openness.  The root may float away leaving a socket ripe for pressing it, or a decompression of absence chambering the surface.

This is not tree-

famine but stonetree

shoulder, not defeated

process in fused re-

cess.  The endpoint

a receptor’s fine

hollow of dish, gath-

erer about desertion


The basic promise for removing kernel is to band in socket, as horizon of mutated (incorporate-collective) defeat.  No ghost image of the absent (drowned) trunk other than a phantom grown pure inference in rock.  Busy loops of counter-absence wherever the socket map was emptied onto extent.

A blunt bowl-reeded

transition, launching-

distance belonging

from defeated

in terms of


The queue for site-specific abandonment upon a placing is never empty: in the absence of correct kernel an unsifted surround erupts at calcified hold.  The body’s case was vacuous but the encasing is conductive surplus, so binding address will default to a referred-absent string of base.

Assignments don’t strew

but rifle the material

landings of thrown

spaces, ample domain-

claims corkscrew the

topple span of

root zone


Empty socket now handles a re-future that there can be some exit covery: verifies a hyper-present on socket wall as remainder, secondary dependence being tougher in care than the vanished (lifted) core.  Not a free space but an extra engrounded ligament, a root of weak attraction does the attrition better than vertical penetration.

A shallow crater rolls

open deep relief

attesting the taller

billow in its eye


Drowned in situ until the residual resident crowns out around the expended (not rescinded) sinews of site.  Never subtract the mirage of a fossil from its socket: to gather bundled ground long after the core is to offer the veering of core to an earth of its rounded disappearance.  A nest of orbital disappearance forever a non-clearance, but craggy safety-ground fused at the departure module.

Socket in bowl

greeting forgotten

joints.  Not a trench

shield but a vertical

trunk yield repacking

the horizontal, cross-

staining the ascent

along ruination

transition fossil from

positional forest:

wrecked or slaked

to accord a clasp

Drawing by Marilyn Lowe of a Stone (Tufa) Nest

Peter Larkin is the author of Terrain Seed Scarcity (Salt, 2001), and Leaves of Field (Shearsman, 2006). A new collection, Lessways Least Scarce Among, is forthcoming from The Gig. Recent work has appeared in fragmente, Free Verse, Salt Magazine, Stride Magazine and Gists & Piths. An interview with Edmund Hardy is available at Intercapillary Space.

Copyright © 2009 by Peter Larkin, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.